Hon Dr MICHAEL CULLEN (Labour) Link to this
In rising to give my valedictory speech I am immediately conscious of three things. The first is that such a speech represents an opportunity denied to most mortals—that is, to deliver one’s own funeral oration, or, at least, a progress report thereon. The second is that my maiden speech was, unfortunately and unintentionally, one of the most oft-quoted—if not the most oft-quoted—maiden speech in the history of this institution, a fate that I hope to avoid today. Although, I comfort myself that the most famous maiden speech in British history was that of Benjamin Disraeli in the 1830s—he was shouted down, and he said: “You will listen to me someday.” Of course, he was later Prime Minister. The third is that most colleagues, especially the newer ones, probably have limited patience for an elderly gentleman engaged in extended verbal borborygmus, or tummy-rumbling, for those of you who do not know the technical language.
I came to this place in 1981, a young senior lecturer in history, fresh from current battles over the Springbok Tour and the proposed Aramoana aluminium smelter. It was an odd career choice for somebody who used to have a strong fear of flying and was ill at ease with strangers. My family background was not untypical of many 20th century stories. Three of my grandparents grew up in great poverty. My maternal grandparents were children in late 19th century London, in an area classified in a ground-breaking and great contemporary social survey as “very poor, bordering on the semi-criminal”. My paternal grandmother was one of three daughters of a widowed charwoman in the days before the welfare State. The British keep their detailed census records, and the household record, I think in 1891, shows my great-grandmother, the three daughters, and a male lodger some 5 years younger than my great-grandmother—so there may be some more stories there yet to be discovered. Only my paternal grandfather, dead well before I was born, was not from such a background. He was one of a line of four tradesmen, ending with my father, which had been preceded by generations of Somerset agricultural labourers.
On top of that background, particular circumstances contributed, I suspect, to my political philosophy. My mother was born 10 days after the outbreak of World War I. My grandfather, as an army reservist, had been called up immediately. He was captured in the first battle fought by the British Expeditionary Force. For months my grandmother did not know whether he was dead or captured. My own mother, the first in the family to go to secondary school, gave birth to me at home because she was suspected of having TB and was not allowed in hospital. This proved enormously useful in the 1980s when the Home Birth Association was seeking speakers on various issues, and I could tell them that I was actually a home birth. My mother’s fierce determination to see me succeed through education eventually led me here, via 13 years of scholarships and an academic career—the first in my family to go to university.
It is not surprising, then, that there have been three basic themes to my political philosophy. The first is a profound belief in the essential equality of all human beings. It is an ideal found as far back in the English radical tradition that I claim as my heritage as the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, when John Ball asked: “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then a gentleman?”, or to translate: “When Adam was digging the fields and Eve was spinning wool, who was the member of the landed gentry at that point?”. The second is a hatred of poverty. Not of wealth—to which, within reason, we can all aspire—but of poverty with its grinding degradation and fundamental unfairness. The third is that economic and social policy must be guided by the ideals of security and opportunity, the two sides of the coin of an enduring and just society, to which we must now add the imperative of sustainability.
It was perhaps inevitable, then, that I would gravitate towards the Labour Party. So when I was approached one Friday night in 1974 in the George Street Tavern by the late Professor Eric Herd to join the Labour Party, I could not think of a good reason to say no—which, of course, is how most of us join voluntary organisations in New Zealand. I became more active because of events in Australia as much as here. I was a visiting fellow at the Australian National University on the fateful day the Whitlam Government was dismissed in 1975. I well remember a colleague who was writing a thesis on the powers of the Australian Governor-General emerging into the corridor pale-faced, and in a broad Australian accent exclaiming: “Jeez, I’ll have to rewrite that whole bloody chapter.” So on coming back home I made the fateful decision to go to the annual general meeting of the Castle Street branch of the Labour Party—always a mistake in New Zealand, because I ended up on the committee. From there on, the path seemed to lead almost inevitably towards becoming the candidate for St Kilda in 1980.
Hence I arrived at this place in November 1981 with my basic philosophical baggage in tow, and I started to settle into the job. It is salutary to remind myself and all my colleagues here today that most of those who then dominated this place have long since been forgotten. The one obvious exception was a kind of walking example of a Hobbesian state of nature, whom many wish they could forget. The entire assistance available to individual backbench MPs at that time was one-half of a secretary. Initially that did not matter too much, since Parliament did not actually meet until the following April. So I busied myself as the MP for St Kilda with electorate work, under the tutelage of my friend and colleague Stan Rodger. Following his example, I immediately began to send sympathy letters offering help to those who had suffered a bereavement. Death was the one aspect of electorate work where St Kilda was well above the national average. One 83-year-old wrote thanking me for my offer of help, but informing me that she could still manage the garden herself. I suddenly had this awful vision of becoming the lesser-spotted mower of South Dunedin, a kind of political hire-a-hubby for thousands of widows. Once Parliament finally met in April 1982, it then sat continuously until mid-December with no adjournment.
In that light, I hope that one of my lasting contributions to this great institution has been to have played for 24 years a central role in the reform of its procedures, starting with my time as senior Government whip. In 1982 the set-piece debates of the Address in Reply, which was annual in those days, the Budget, and the Estimates took a total of over 10 weeks’ sitting time. Voting was done by way of long, tedious, and time-wasting divisions in the lobbies. Oral questions were set down days in advance—not that morning—but many questions were not reached, as question time was limited to 45 minutes. Urgency meant continuous sitting, 24 hours a day, without a break. All these matters have been substantially reformed to provide a more rational system. Time-limited debates, party voting, meal and sleep breaks in urgency, and regular short adjournments have all proved successful initiatives.
Question time is much more immediate, timely, and flexible, and it deals with all questions put down. Despite criticisms from some, it is, in my view, by far the most effective test of the mettle of Ministers and of their opponents of any Westminster-style Parliament. Just watch the farce that is Australian question time to see the contrast. Imagine, for example, how well George W Bush would have survived question time on a daily basis if he had been our Prime Minister. It would have taken many Grecians bearing many sorts of gifts to get him through the experience. Such testing is the real purpose of question time. It is not to elicit a recitation of simple facts—as I tell my colleagues, you really ought to know the answer before you ask a question that is a factual one—but to hold Ministers to account and test their mettle. That is why it is easily the most popular part of the televised proceedings, and, as some members may have gathered over the years, it is the part of Parliament that I have most enjoyed over a long period of time.
I would go further. Much of Parliament is a form of theatre, a stage on which ideas and personalities contest for dominance. It is neither a simple legislative sausage machine, nor a company board, nor some kind of policy group-grope—or, as we now call them, summits. The vast majority of MPs come here to try to improve the lives of their fellow New Zealanders, however much we may differ as to the means of so doing. I think we sometimes need to recognise that fact of each other. So the most depressing comment about MPs that I can recall was when one senior press gallery member claimed that the default position of politicians was to lie. One might easily respond that the default position of journalists is to misrepresent and manipulate. Neither statement is a fair reflection of the truth. I would assert that for all its faults, and the occasional silliness, the system works far better than any known alternative.
There have been enormous changes in form over the time I have been an MP, and enormous change in the nature of members of Parliament. As Helen referred to in her validictory statement, there were just eight women MPs after the 1981 election—I think that actually doubled the total before the 1981 election, if I recollect correctly—there were a small number of Māori MPs, and that was the total contribution in terms of ethnic diversity in the New Zealand Parliament. But the substance of the place has changed much less, even with the changes under mixed-member proportional representation. Certainly, the belief of those who promoted MMP—that there would be some kind of beautiful consensus style of politics in this place—was at best a delusion, and, perhaps, a complete falsehood to try to convince the public to vote for the change. We simply changed from a simple, straightforward boxing match to a tag-wrestling match where sometimes people seem to change their shorts between each team as they move along. That is one of the problems, of course, with televised coverage of Parliament.
I arrived in this place at a time when my party was divided, a division that, in one form or another, lasted through to the middle of 1996. I came knowing I was the MP for St Kilda for one reason alone: I wore a Labour jersey. Since that time it has been my desire to help create a strong, modern, and unified social democratic party wearing the proud old name of Labour. That was not easy. In the 1980s the urgent and necessary process of modernisation and reform—and it was urgent and necessary—lurched off into ideological excesses, underpinned by the belief that there was no gain without pain. That came to mean that pain must inevitably lead to gain and then to a kind of political sadomasochism in which pain almost seemed to become an end in itself. It is interesting that when we look at the data, we see that the great gap in GDP per capita and incomes between Australia and New Zealand opened up between 1984 and 1993. Australia essentially carried out most of the same reforms that we did. The essential difference was that in Australia, far greater attention was paid to the transition costs and in helping people through the process of reform. We simply threw thousands of people on to the scrap heap and assumed that somehow or another the miracle of the market would then take them up again into some better life. For many, that better life never actually arrived.
It certainly caused me a little financial pain. The biggest speeding fine I ever got was driving back from Whakatāne to Wellington in January 1990 when I heard a report on the news claiming that Geoffrey Palmer was thinking of reinstating Roger Douglas as Minister of Finance. I hit 134 kilometres an hour before a firm but polite traffic cop restored me to my senses.
The persistent divisions, the consequent weakening of the Labour Party, and the introduction of MMP meant that in the early to mid - 1990s it appeared far from impossible that we in Labour would cease to be the dominant voice of the centre-left in New Zealand. At times we were the third or fourth party in opinion polls. The need to build a policy platform of a socially progressive, economically literate, fiscally conservative party was obvious. It could, and should, have been done in the 1980s. It was done under Helen Clark’s leadership, and I am proud to have had some small role to play in that regard. That laid the basis for a long period in Government.
The fifth Labour Government succeeded, I believe, in hauling the pendulum of economic debate back towards the centre. But there are still flaws inherited from the extreme free-market view of the world that need to be addressed. In particular, the current economic crisis must lead to coordinated international reform of regulation of the financial sector. If not, the whole cycle will be repeated again with even more disastrous consequences. I believe that reform must have four clear elements. The first is a series of principles-based rules, rather than attempts to write black-letter law regulation, which only provides the opportunity for regulatory arbitrage. The second is very strong disclosure requirements on all those involved within the financial sector. Indeed, one of the problems creating the current crisis was that even those in the financial sector did not know what the various parts of their own organisation were doing, which led to some of the difficulties. The third is to give the national regulators broad coercive and intervention powers that are not excessively specified, so that people, again, cannot manoeuvre their way around what they think may be going to happen. Finally, there has to be international coordination between the national regulators, and international exchange of that disclosed information, so that, again, people cannot play the game of arbitrage between different national jurisdictions.
If we do not do those things, every Western Government will have raised its level of debt by some enormous amount, trying to compensate and trying to save the financial sector to keep the real economy moving, for those who run the financial sector will repeat the entire cycle again with new clever instruments and at that point—same again—the same working middle-class people will be dipping into their pockets in terms of future taxes to pay for the errors that have been committed. That is what we now face in New Zealand, as we face it in the US, as we face it in UK, and as we face it in almost every developed economy around the world. We are now committing our children, and even grandchildren, to higher taxes because of what we are having to do at the present time to prop up the economy.
It has been said that there are two sorts of finance Ministers: those who fail and those who get out just in time. Let me assure colleagues that I did not personally organise the world recession to avoid being categorised as one of the former. During my stewardship, I have claimed, fiscal conservatism accompanied by a consciously counter-cyclical management of the economy was accompanied by crucial initiatives in tax reform, a long overdue addressing of our dismal savings record—an issue on which I have changed my views completely over the last 20 years—the creation of the New Zealand Superannuation Fund, a much more pragmatic approach to supporting business, a massive increase in infrastructure spending, and a sharing of the fruits of growth, particularly through Working for Families, low unemployment, cheaper primary health care, and the restoration of the level of New Zealand superannuation. I am immensely proud that we were the first Government for decades to reduce inequality in New Zealand. Consciously or unconsciously, all Governments engage in social engineering. The real issue is whether the structures thus created are ethically sound. I am particularly concerned that the current Government still has not grasped the significance of the profound contribution that the growing gap between saving and borrowing economies has made to the present economic crisis in the world. It is not all due to the incompetence, the short-termism, and the greed of the so-called banksters. I am certainly convinced that a future Government will have to rebuild KiwiSaver to play a bigger role in dealing with those imbalances, and the New Zealand Superannuation Fund must be continued as part of our long-term fiscal strategy.
I also have to say that I am fearful that the essence of the tertiary education reforms may be unwound. If they are, we will inevitably see a recurrence of the mushrooming of wasteful expenditure on low-value courses. If the recession is causing a higher demand for training and education, then the answer is not to reinstate a drive to expensive, competitive mediocrity and duplication. Indeed, the current crisis provides the opportunity for a major push on skills, particularly to accelerate the implementation of the New Zealand Skills Strategy. This will do much more to increase future productivity than many other policies that have been put forward. The crisis is also a chance to intensify investment in a greener economy, not to wind back on it. Every day brings more evidence of the urgency of that task.
Apart from being Minister of Finance, Leader of the House, and Minister for Tertiary Education, I have enjoyed other portfolios. It was great fun to be Attorney-General, and to prove—going by many kind messages from senior members of the judiciary and the legal profession—that the Attorney-General does not have to be a lawyer, any more than the Minister of Education has to be a teacher, the Minister of Health a doctor, or the Minister of Corrections a convict. My year as Treaty negotiations Minister was a wonderful experience, which I hope set the pace and tone for the future. I wish this and future Governments well in dealing with Treaty issues, and look forward to further engagement in them. No issue more profoundly goes to the heart of our nationhood. No Treaty settlement ever does or can fully right the historic wrongs. Every Treaty settlement so far has been generous—generous by the Māori party in the settlement, not by the Crown party in the settlement. But settlements can provide the basis for acknowledging the past and providing a more secure basis on which to move forward.
The highlight of my time as Minister of Social Welfare was to rewrite a flawed Children and Young Persons Bill that I inherited, and to produce the 1989 Act, which has stood the test of time in its basics and will continue to do so, providing it is properly resourced. If it is not, then it will actually fail. Being Acting Prime Minister on many occasions had its moments of drama as well as opportunities for pratfalls. Of course, I should note that being Acting Prime Minister in the modern world of technology, particularly with Helen Clark as Prime Minister, was not exactly one with a large number of degrees of freedom—although I am notoriously loath, on occasions, to read texts and email messages, so sometimes the comments came after decisions were made. My best pratfall was to refer on the radio to the military leader of Fiji as “Barmy Mariner”. I am still not sure I was wrong, of course.
Any long political career will also have failures and low points, and mine has been no exception. The failure to stop the philistine obscenity of the Clyde high dam, the lack of a consensus around the foreshore and seabed issue—and I wish the panel well in its work—the difficulty of getting a simple approach to the problem of leaky homes, and, I have to say, and I hope that this will not be misinterpreted by the friends upstairs, the failure to get the majority of the press gallery to understand fiscal policy were just four of my many failures. At a deeper level it is sad to see our continued national insecurity and self-doubt, even before the economic crisis hit home. Anyone who visits Australia frequently will know how different the underlying mood is there, especially among the business community. There is a much higher level of underlying confidence and self-assurance. An Aussie believes a little ripper is something good. We are just as likely to fear it might be the son of Jack, let in by mistake by immigration. We need to remind ourselves that over the last 50 years we have maintained a First World quality of life, despite an international trading system massively biased against what we do best in this country. That is a major achievement. So as we carry on building that network of free-trade agreements, and, as we hope, the World Trade Organization can again pick up the issue of a comprehensive fair and free trade agreement, that is the most crucial key to our prosperity in the long term within this country.
The ever-increasing trend towards a purely punitive approach to the problem of crime is a self-defeating journey that we continue to travel, ignoring the fact that it leads nowhere. On the other hand, the increasing litigiousness associated with so much of our lives must sooner or later prompt a radical rethink of our legal system. Perhaps those two issues are linked in some way or another. And there have been personal low points, when I have turned to family, friends in the caucus, and others for help and have received it.
But today I want to emphasise the many good things that I have been part of. Apart from some of those I have mentioned already, the end of the right to rape one’s wife, which was still a legal right in 1981 when I entered this Parliament; the end of the attempt to prevent gay people being themselves, which was still the law in 1981 when I entered this Parliament; the end of corporal punishment in schools, which was still the law and practice in 1981 when I entered this Parliament; the greater openness about domestic violence and mental health issues, which were still being swept under the carpet in those days; and the increasing diversity, richness, and tolerance of our society are all things to be celebrated.
New Zealand is, in fact, far less of a “nanny State” than it was in 1981 in terms of both social and economic freedoms. It takes a peculiarly warped sense of values to equate using an obsolete, inefficient light bulb to the right to be who you are.
I have so many people to thank that I dare not start a comprehensive list, for fear of missing somebody out. Many of them are in the gallery, but many are not. So I would just wish to mention in particular two people: my friend and leader Helen Clark and my wife Anne. I have gone one better than the old saying about successful men—there has been one good woman behind me, but also another in front.
I leave now with a profound sense of gratitude at the chance to serve, a belief that my staunchly Labour maternal grandfather would have been proud of me, and the hope that my grandchildren will be. I wish you all well, especially my Labour colleagues who have been so loyal and so patient. Politics is at times a rough and a bruising business. I apologise to all those I unfairly or unnecessarily have been harsh to. Please note the qualifications in that sentence. And that also applies to those who are not in the Labour Party. Sometimes a quick wit and a quick tongue can move too fast. Slow down; you do move too fast on occasions. To those in Government, good luck, but remember that some day the political wheel will turn again; it does. And a genuine thank you for the New Zealand Post appointment. When I attacked National last year for swallowing so many dead rats, little did I think that some might see me as one of them!
To my Labour friends, good luck. Look forward to the day the political wheel will turn again, and make sure you give it a damn good shove in the meantime. I know I leave you in good hands with Phil and Annette. To the Greens, good luck. But loosen up a bit. Saving the planet needs to sound less like punishment for our sins if it is going to succeed. To all of you, remember one thing. Your job is to serve the people, not yourself. If you ever start to feel a sense of entitlement about being here, look around these walls at the names there and understand what true sacrifice and service means. So Mr Speaker, it has already been goodbye from her and now it’s goodbye from me. Kia ū, kia māia, kia manawanui. Hei konei rā.